Teenager finds educational software exposed millions of student records

Teenager Bill Demirkapi had been ghosted. Hard. "It didn’t feel good," he explained to the large crowd gathered to hear him speak. "It hurt my feelings.” 

But Demirkapi, despite his status as a recent high-school graduate, wasn't lamenting the traditional spurned-love problems typical of his cohort. Far from it. Instead, he was speaking at the famous DEF CON hacker conference in Las Vegas, and the ghoster-in-question was educational software maker Blackboard. 

Demirkapi had reported numerous vulnerabilities in Blackboard's software to the company; after initially being in communication with him, the company stopped responding to his emails. But Demirkapi, who found he could access a host of student data — including family military status, weighted GPAs, and special education status — through vulnerabilities in Blackboard's system, was undeterred.  Read more...